The Cartomancy Workbook Read online

  THE CARTOMANCY WORKBOOK

  A Beginner’s Guide to Fortune Telling with Playing Cards

  Emily Peach

  Copyright © Emily Peach 2015

  Emily Peach has asserted her moral right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

  All Rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, copied, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written consent of the copyright holder, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  CONTENTS

  GETTING STARTED

  USING THIS BOOK TO YOUR BEST ADVANTAGE

  DIVISIONS AND ATTRIBUTIONS

  THE SUIT OF CLUBS

  BUILDING AND USING POSITIONAL SPREADS

  THE SUIT OF HEARTS

  BUILDING AND USING SEQUENTIAL SPREADS

  THE SUIT OF SPADES

  MAJORITIES AND COMBINATIONS

  THE SUIT OF DIAMONDS

  MORE ABOUT COURT CARDS

  THE EXPERIMENT

  WHAT NEXT

  GETTING STARTED

  Listed below in order of priority are the things you will need to work with this book, together with a brief explanation of their uses. The only urgent item is the first one on the list, but you should try to get hold of the others as soon as you can, because you will need them to protect your cards properly.

  A Deck of Playing Cards

  There are a lot of attractive decks to choose from, but try to avoid buying plastic-coated cards. They last longer, but they are very slippery, and can be difficult to shuffle safely. You are, in any event, going to have to ‘mark’ your cards and marking plastic cards satisfactorily is next door to impossible.

  A Notebook

  The Cartomancy Workbook asks that you do quite a lot of writing and/or sketching, and as you should keep all your notes for future reference – and will probably want to add to them as time goes by – you will need a sturdy ‘specific purpose’ notebook.

  A Silk Scarf

  All physical objects collect ‘impressions’ or ‘vibrations’ from their surroundings and Playing Cards are no exception. It is possible to ‘read’ those impressions and come up with an accurate description of past events, but whilst that is very interesting, you obviously do not want past impressions attaching themselves to your cards and perhaps ‘colouring’ your readings. Silk rejects such impressions; the scarf will keep your cards clean of them and ensure that your readings are untainted, and therefore as accurate as possible. Any silk scarf will do but it must be kept for this purpose and this purpose only. Do not buy anything you would be tempted to wear!

  A Wooden Box

  When you have wrapped your cards in their scarf, cards and scarf should be kept in a wooden box when they are not in use. The box serves very much the same purpose as the scarf, and wood is the material of choice for much the same reasons. It, too, will protect your cards from ‘impressions’ – and from prying eyes and fingers, and unnecessary physical wear and tear and accident.

  A Cloth to Work On

  Ideally, this, too, should be silk. You will be using it to cover any surface on which you intend to lay out your cards, and in many cases you will have no idea where that surface has been, or what it has been used for, or by whom – and I think in particular of the furniture provided for use at psychic fairs, charitable functions and church fêtes. It is no use wrapping and boxing your cards carefully if you then lay them out on an unsuitable surface. If possible, find (or make) a thick black silk cloth – and add a heavy fringe. Clients tend to lean on the cloth, and silk tends to slide. The fringe will help to weight the cloth, and prevent your readings drifting away from you toward the other side of the table, or – worse! – sliding off the table altogether.

  ‘Breaking in’ Your Deck

  Immediately you have bought your Deck, begin to ‘break it in’. Wrap it in its scarf and carry it with you everywhere for a month or so. Sleep with it under your pillow, and handle it as much as you possibly can. This will serve to ‘activate’ you to your Deck and vice versa, and will help you to become accustomed to the feel of your cards. Never let anyone play with your Deck. It is very personal to you despite the fact that many other people own one just like it. Allowing other people to handle your cards or play games with them will destroy all the protective qualities of your scarf and box and undo all your ‘activation’ work.

  USING THIS BOOK TO YOUR BEST ADVANTAGE

  This book is designed to enable you to read playing cards as quickly as possible. Each chapter consists of a mini-lecture followed by one or more tasks – and as no one likes to be asked to do anything without knowing why, this chapter sets out all of the things you are going to be asked to do, and explains why it is in your best interests to do them.

  The first and most important thing to understand, though, is that the power to make your cards anything other than exactly what they appear to be lies inside you and nowhere else.

  In fact, although this chapter explains quite a lot about your Deck and what you are going to need to do to it and with it in the near future in order to learn to read it accurately, it is really more about you than anything else.

  THINGS YOU WILL BE ASKED TO DO

  Most of the accurate information a reader provides is purely intuitive, but the Deck has divisions and attributions that – together with the two meanings allocated to each individual card – help to focus and direct the reader’s intuition. We shall be dealing with these divisions and attributions in the next chapter, and I am afraid there is no alternative to learning them by rote.

  1. Take the time to get to grips with the divisions and attributions of your Deck.

  It is really important to learn this basic information very thoroughly. Intuition is a faculty of the unconscious mind. The unconscious mind is knowledgeable in a completely different and far more powerful way than the conscious mind, has access to sources of information that are unavailable to the conscious mind, and knows more about life, the universe and everything than anyone is ever consciously aware of – but it does have a tendency to drift like a rudderless boat unless it is directed into a specific area and made to focus upon that area to the exclusion of everything else. Learning the divisions and attributions of your Deck will help make that happen.

  2. Mark Your Cards

  The standard playing card deck has been used to tell fortunes for centuries, but the absence of pictures on most of the cards – and the fact that none of them have any orientation despite the fact that each card has two meanings – has always made learning to use it unnecessarily onerous and difficult for beginners. For this reason you will be asked at the end of this chapter to ‘mark’ your cards so as to impose an orientation on them and provide yourself with an ‘extra’ helpful Deck division.

  The easiest way to ‘mark’ your cards is to draw a small arrow on the right hand side of each of the cards. If you do this carefully and use red or black ink appropriately – red for Diamonds and Hearts and Black for Spades and Clubs – very few people will ever notice that your cards differ in any way from a regular Deck.

  3. Relate card orientation to the meanings of the cards.

  In this book the two meanings associated with each card are referred to as being Dignified and Ill-Dignified. For example:

  The Two of Clubs

  Dignified: Job related benefits, i.e. company cars, expense accounts, etc.

  Ill-Dignified: Petty theft, kick backs, bribes and ‘sweeteners’.

  When the top of the arrow you have used to ‘mark your cards is pointing upward, the card will be considered to be Dignified and the Dignified meaning will apply.

  When the tip of your ‘marking’ arrow is pointing downward the card will be considered to be Ill-Dignified and its Ill-Dignified meaning will apply.

  Please note that the Ill-Dignified orientation of a card does not always indicate that the card is ‘bad news’ – although that will sometimes be the case. Orientation exists solely to help focus the attention of the reader’s unconscious mind. We shall be talking about Dignity and the importance of preserving it when reading the cards in later chapters.

  4. Learn the dates applicable to each Astrological sign.

  You will sometimes need to choose a card to represent the person you are reading for, and you will always need to be able to identify the card that represents your Querent if and when it appears randomly when the cards are dealt. Usually this is done by using the Signs of the Zodiac that are attributed to specific cards. Some people do not know their Astrological Sign – which means, of course, that you will need to be able to identify it from their date of birth.

  5. Learn the physical characteristics attributed to specific cards.

  Sometimes you will not be able to choose a card to represent a person using the standard western astrological system; some people are unfamiliar with that system and many people who enquire about their friends or acquaintances do not have the relevant information. In that event you will need to use physical characteristics to choose an appropriate card. This is not a particularly efficient way of proceeding – these attributions were allocated to the cards centuries ago by European people to represent other European people – but it is better than nothing!

  6. Learn the meanings of the cards.

  Learning the meanings of the cards as quickly and easily as
possible involves following a five step system. The first step is to ‘Look, Listen, and Write’. The remaining four steps ask that you:

  Use Fantasy Plays;

  Sketch card layouts and do practice readings;

  Go through a ‘Look, Recall, and Repeat’ process, and

  Combine all of the above three steps.

  This means that each of the four sections of the Deck will likely take up several hours of your time over a period of at least seven days – but, and for reasons that will become clear shortly, this will be time well spent.

  ABOUT ‘LOOK, LISTEN, AND WRITE’

  The easiest way to begin to learn anything is to use a ‘Look, Listen, and Write’ process – very much the same process you used when you were at school. It is quite easy to simulate that ‘classroom’ situation by recording the meanings given in each chapter, and then playing them back to yourself. Look at the card, listen to each of its two meanings, write down the meanings.

  If you cannot or do not want to make recordings, look at the card, read each of the two meanings aloud, then write down the meanings.

  Obviously, if you are reading out or listening to the Dignified meaning of a particular card, then the card you are working with should be Dignified, too, with its marking arrow pointing upwards.

  As you will soon begin to appreciate, you are learning a new language. It is therefore very important to attach the correct concept to the appropriate symbols that are going to represent that concept – material security and thrift to the figure 6, a red diamond, and an upward pointing red arrow, for example, from day one.

  ABOUT FANTASY PLAYS

  When you first begin to work with your cards, you may find that although you absorb the meanings of each card relatively quickly, it is difficult to relate one card to another. The easiest way to get over this problem is to use ‘Fantasy Plays’ – in other words to try to relate the given meaning of one card to the given meaning of another by laying a series of cards out in a line and making up a story based on those cards.

  Using Fantasy Plays will help the meanings to stick in your mind, and set your unconscious mind working for you so that, over a period, the simple meanings given in this book will change, deepen, and expand.

  Your ‘stories’ will be very short in the beginning – and you will probably sound very hesitant at first – but as you go on you will find that you become more and more fluent and that, as more and more cards become available to you, you will begin to be able to make up quite interesting and involved little histories. At that point, you will likely start to appreciate that those histories are no longer ‘made up stories’ at all, and that they in fact relate to you and your own situation, or to people you know and the things that are happening in their lives.

  Always read out your interpretation of your Fantasy Play cards aloud. It is important to get used to ‘speaking out’ fluently and confidently. It is likely that your initial attempts at ‘reading aloud’ will be stilted and uncertain, but because your unconscious mind synthesises information and takes an overall view rather than concentrating on specific details as the conscious mind does, if you practice often you will soon find that you can read a line of cards smoothly and confidently, and that your stories are coherent and have a beginning, a middle, and an end. The trick is to try not to feel self-conscious, or think consciously about what you are doing. Just say whatever comes into your head, and go on saying it until you stop.

  Best practice is to begin to Fantasy Play directly you have finished writing out the meanings of whichever cards you are working with and before you go on to the Practice Reading.

  ABOUT THE PRACTICE READINGS

  Every chapter is followed by one or more Practice Readings. Like Fantasy Plays, Practice Readings will help you to remember the meanings of the cards and relate one meaning to another as well as setting your unconscious mind to work for you. Moreover, they will also help you to learn to shuffle and lay out the cards in various patterns quickly, confidently, and professionally, and begin to understand how and why those patterns are constructed as they are.

  Eventually, you will be able to design such patterns for yourself. In the meantime, sketching card layouts will allow you to build up a useful portfolio and help you to remember specific patterns and what they are used for.

  Again, best practice is to read out your interpretation of the cards aloud.

  ABOUT ‘LOOK, RECALL, AND REPEAT’

  Developing intuition is simply a matter of accessing and harnessing the power of your unconscious mind – which means understanding something about how your unconscious mind works.

  As I remarked at the beginning of this chapter, the unconscious mind is knowledgeable in a completely different and far more powerful way than the conscious mind, has access to sources of information that are unavailable to the conscious mind, and knows more about life, the universe and everything than anyone is ever consciously aware of. It is also capable of synthesizing everything it knows – but it does not use language.

  The unconscious mind receives information from the conscious mind solely by way of images and feelings. When your unconscious mind wants to communicate information to your conscious mind, it naturally uses images and feelings with which you are very familiar, but – either because the images are used purely symbolically, or because your conscious mind would not normally associate the ideas intended to be conveyed with the images used – its messages are often baffling or incomprehensible. The first step toward developing your intuition is therefore to foster a mutual understanding between your conscious and unconscious minds by providing them with a common ‘picture’ language.

  You will begin to develop that common language automatically immediately you start to ‘Look, Listen and Write’, because words cause pictures to rise in the mind automatically – if you think of a cat or a car right now, for example, you will automatically cause a picture of a cat or a car to rise in your mind – but it is important to improve on those initial pictures, and make them clearer and more precise.

  In order to do that you will need to try to remember something from your own experience – or something about someone else – that will remind you of a particular meaning, then draw a rough sketch of the salient features of the card – including the mark you have made to indicate its orientation – and write out or make a sketch of your personal memory alongside it.

  For example: the dignified meaning of the Four of Diamonds is “examinations and assessments of ability”. You might therefore recall a particular examination of your own when you are dealing with that card – a driving test, perhaps – and write out what you remember about it. Afterwards you will need to ‘attach’ that memory to the dignified aspect of the card by looking at the card, recalling the experience, and repeating the given meaning.

  It is very important to appreciate that the unconscious mind reacts much more slowly than the conscious mind, and that the key to using this method successfully is constant repetition.

  You will need to go through the whole ‘Look, Recall, and Repeat’ process several times very slowly when you begin to work with your cards – looking, recalling and repeating, and looking, recalling and repeating again – to be sure of impressing your unconscious mind that, henceforth, this is going to mean that to all concerned.

  Best practice is to deal with no more than two cards every evening before you go to bed, and to think about and visualise those two cards and their four meanings and attached memories before you go to sleep and periodically throughout the following day.

  ABOUT COMBINING THE STEP

  Best practice is to combine the ‘Look, Recall, and Repeat‘ process with a Fantasy Play or a Practice Reading, using all of the cards you are familiar with and have learned about, once every couple of days. You will find that your Fantasy Plays and your Practice Readings improve as a result. The basic meanings given in this book are very simple indeed. However, if you go through the step by step process described here, you will find that those meanings change, deepen, expand, and become much more complex over time without your making any conscious effort to make that happen. Meanings change in that way because the unconscious mind gradually attaches layer upon layer of meaning to the original concept and its associated images as it goes through the process of synthesizing everything it knows about or associates with those images.